Sunday, April 28, 2019

[Asian] Students for Fair Admissions Misdirected Beef


Per The Harvard GazetteAfrican-Americans constitute 15.5 percent of the Harvard class of 2022, Asian-Americans 22.7 percent, Latinos 12.2 percent, Native Americans 2 percent, and Native Hawaiians 0.4 percent with whites constituting almost a whopping 50 percent. 
However, NBC news posted (Feb. 14, 2019) from the Associated Press article "Affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard in judge's hands":
A federal judge will now decide whether Harvard University intentionally discriminates against Asian-American applicants, an allegation made in a 2014 lawsuit brought by Students for Fair Admissions [i.e., Asian students who were rejected by Harvard] who built their case around a Duke University professor's analysis of Harvard admissions records that concluded that the Harvard's personal rating, which scores applicants on traits including "courage" and "likability", works against Asian-Americans while favoring [B]lack and Hispanic students. 
How could those Asians and that Duke professor blame African-American and Latino students for their rejection letters when Whites are the most accepted demographic? Whites should have been the number one suspects. 
Maybe their views have changed since the news of the college cheating scandal broke where David K. Li reported for NBC News (March 13, 2019) that:
[Mark] Riddell, a 2004 Harvard graduate and a four-year tennis letter winner, is a key figure in the massive college-admissions probe dubbed Operation Varsity Blues. The federal probe announced Tuesday ensnared dozens of parents who allegedly paid millions of dollars to falsify college applications and get their children into elite universities.
Riddell took SAT and ACT exams for students between 2012 and this past February, according to a criminal complaint. He was paid $10,000 per test, prosecutors said.
Olivia Jade & Lori Loughlin 
The most famous famous suspects in the college cheating scandal are actress Lori Loughlin and her influencer daughter Olivia Jade. According to the Vanity Fair article "'Operation Varsity Blues' Is the One Scam to Rule Them All" (MARCH 12, 2019), Loughlin and her husband paid $500,000 for Olivia to get into the University of Southern California. Shamelessly, Olivia shared with her influencees, "I don't really care about school."
Olivia Jade "I don't really care about school."
Thus, this is further evidence that the Students for Fair Admissions (i.e., Asian students who were rejected by elite schools.) have misdirected their beef that should be directed at privileged whites and not with underprivileged African-Americans and Latinos students. 

Saturday, April 13, 2019

The Plight of Nelson Algren: Is Someone Secretly Stopping Your Book Sales?



Jonathan Dee related in his New Yorker piece, "Nelson Algren’s Street Cred: [...] Algren became one of the most celebrated novelists of his era. Why did he disappear into obscurity?", that Ernest Hemingway referred to Algren as the “beat Dostoyevsky”.

Algren, a "proletarian naturalist poet" and novelist, had "fanboys" who included Terry Southern, Russell Banks, Cormac McCarthy, and Thomas Pynchon who, of Algren, said, “is behind a great deal of what I do”.


Dee shared that Colin Asher wrote in Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren that Algren's:

[...] first novel, “Somebody in Boots” (originally titled “Native Son”: his good friend Richard Wright’s book of that name hadn’t been written yet), sold a meagre seven hundred and sixty copies, failing to earn back its two-hundred-dollar advance. Many first novels tank in this way, and many first novelists are despondent as a result, but twenty-six-year-old Algren—in what would be a harbinger of how he handled perceived failures later in life—took the blow particularly hard, and tried at least once to commit suicide. 

His friends feared for his sanity. Invited to New York to address the first-ever American Writers’ Congress, Algren stood shaking at the lectern, mumbling the same sentences over and over, which gradually became audible: “My book was a failure. Please buy my book.” [...]

[...] Algren’s late-career slide into irrelevance, Asher says, was no impartial operation of fashion or taste but the result of an orchestrated plot by Hoover’s F.B.I. to silence him, at the peak of the McCarthy era. What’s more, the plot itself, in Asher’s telling, was the direct result of a gratuitous insult Algren inserted into “The Man with the Golden Arm”—mockingly employing the surnames of two known turncoats who had identified, sometimes for money, many former friends and colleagues as members of the Communist Party. 

Incensed, the two men sought revenge by naming Algren to the F.B.I. and to the House Un-American Activities Committee, prompting an investigation that turned Algren into a pariah and sabotaged his career. 

But “they operated in secret,” Asher writes, “so Algren blamed himself when his life began falling apart. He presumed the paranoia and depression that began to cripple him in the nineteen-fifties were the result of personal weakness, and decided his books were not being published because no one wanted to read them.”